Lars and His Real Girls

Bjrk. Nicole Kidman. Kirsten Dunst. As Lars Von Trier retreats forever into his self-imposed media blackout, here are three stories from an interview this summer with the Danish director—mind games! Smashed furniture! Pervy jokes!—about his most famous leading ladies*

*And a weird extra bit about a guy and a dead donkey

No more shall he speak. For years, the world of cinema has been enlivened by the provocative thoughts, heartfelt explanations and idiosyncratic views of the Danish director Lars von Trier, but on October 5, 2011, he announced that, for him, the era of free speech was forever over. After being interviewed that afternoon by police investigating the "justification of war crimes" in the wake of his Hitler/Nazi comments at a Cannes press conference earlier this year (as forensically contextualized in the October issue of GQ), he issued a statement concluding: "I have realized that I do not possess the skills to express myself unequivocally and I have therefore decided from this day forth to refrain from all public statements and interviews."

But how he used to talk. One of several controversies that has bubbled around Trier’s career for many years concerns the role of women in his work. Often he has faced accusatory suggestions that there is something unhealthy, and perhaps misogynistic, about the way female characters are depicted in his movies, and in parallel with this accusation, that there is something unhealthy, and perhaps misogynistic, about the way in which he treats his female actors. Much of this, however, likely derives from one calamitous conflict—between Trier and Bjrk while making the musical Dancer in the Dark—and quite a few other actresses he has worked with, before and since, have had little but good things to say about the experience. Here—in what GQ now presents as a tribute to the golden era when Lars von Trier spoke (though truthfully we were just about to print this anyway)—are three case studies.

1. Bjrk

After working with Trier, Bjrk declared that she would never make another movie. "Fundamentally," says Trier, "it was a problem that both of us, normally with things, we got it our way, where we decided as a dictator over a product. She was used to doing that and I was used to doing that..." Things started off badly. Trier says she was 24 hours late for their first meeting, explaining that she had just had to go at the last minute to a party on a Greek island via private jet as if there was no way someone wouldn’t understand that. "She said it with such pleasure—it was such a wonderful thing. And straightaway I said to her ’Can’t you see why this will never work?’"

Among the memorabilia on a wall at Zentropa, the Danish film studio Trier co-owns, is a pink pillow, embroidered with words in Icelandic—a pillow that Trier had commissioned and sent to Bjrk at one point during their collaboration, but which she later returned. Its text: "If I always allow myself the time to feel my feelings, and then tell what I feel, then Lars can’t manipulate me." "It is of course nonsense—I can see that now," he says. "Of course that’s how I really could manipulate her." He remembers too how Bjrk passed on to him some advice she’d received from her grandfather: "Never work with a Dane because he will eat your soul." (Iceland was a Danish colony for several centuries.) "Everyday she had something like that," he says.

As filming progressed, relations between them deteriorated. Trier remembers that at one point Bjrk didn’t turn up on set for several days in a row. "She didn’t feel like filming. It cost us a lot of money everyday. And we knew that her and her people would always win because they didn’t care. They didn’t give a shit...It was like dealing with terrorists." When she eventually reappeared, Trier told his Zentropa co-owner what he really wanted to do in retaliation, and that it would be expensive: "He said, ’Do it! Do it!’ I don’t think any other producer in the world..." And so, once Bjrk was in costume, Trier announced that he wasn’t available to film that day. Instead he drank schnapps and played tennis.

There’s more. "I met Bjrk one day and instead of saying hello she spat on the ground," he says. She refused to speak to him. Later, her assistant came and said that she was now ready to talk. When Trier went in to see her, he found himself suddenly overcome by how humiliating this all was. "I took a chair and there was a big monitor right beside her and I just smashed it. For no reason, or for the reason of the whole thing. And I walked out. What was so strange is that she came to me and for the first time in our whole relationship she was nice to me, and—you won’t believe this—she said ’I want to ask you something—is it OK that I write a song about how much you’ve given me?’ And I didn’t even answer, I remember. Because it was so absurd, because of the violent hostility that we had been through. It was so completely crazy."

Trier’s belief, aside from the one-dictator-too-many issue, was that though her performance was incredible ("somehow, which is very strange, her performance is there"), Bjrk’s inability to separate herself from her character took a terrible toll. "The first time I saw Bjrk perform I said ’Wow.’ She has a power that was incredible...The problem with Bjrk, of course, was that when she was really, really sad in the film, she was sad for real." Perhaps, though, as an example of the over-honesty and slightly clumsy straight-talk that he now intends to avoid, he does also say this: "But the problem with her was a little bit like the problem you have with women—sometimes they do something that you don’t really understand. Something that you can’t calculate and you have no idea why they say it and why they do it. That’s my experience. I have no idea why she reacted in some of the situations like she did."

Bjrk herself has generally chosen to say little on the matter (and declined to so for this story), but at one point she did post a short but acute analysis online, which while acknowledging the resultant power of his movies, says: "...you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier’s case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence."

Trier is aware of her theory: "It’s so abstract. I’m not in doubt that she believes that, but it’s just nothing I can recognize... I know she wrote a letter to Nicole saying that she shouldn’t take the part. It must be her conviction that she was saving Nicole from injuries. I’m sure that was the content of the letter she sent. But Nicole didn’t listen, it seems."

2. Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman appeared in Trier’s movie Dogville, the horrifying tale of what might happen if a runaway woman with an undisclosed past relied on the kindness of a small, remote town. Kidman has said little about the experience of making the film (which many, Trier included, consider among his best), though she declined the offer to appear in the rest of what Trier intended as a trilogy. There was also a documentary made of the shoot, DogvilleConfessions, which reinforces the sense that working with Trier may be more unusual than he realizes. Two episodes involving Kidman stand out in particular. In the first, they are filming a scene in which Kidman’s character is being raped for the first time; after he shouts "cut," Trier is seen walking over to some other people on the set and joking merrily with them about aspects of the shot and it takes a moment to notice Kidman standing there, clearly expecting and waiting for the hug of consolation that, eventually, he supplies. When I mention this to him, he says "I did a lot of that," (meaning the hugging and suchlike) then adds, "But maybe I’m a little bit more tough, but I don’t see it as not being in the interest of the actors. It’s a little bit on how you raise your children. I am not very tough with raising my children, but you can argue that to be more tough will help your children. And that is how I’m being tough, I think. I’m clever enough to know that if Nicole doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t feel love she can’t give the maximum." Talking further, he seems to both deny that there is anything unusual and disconcerting about the way he treats actors (on this subject, it is impossible to forget his statement about actors when he was being interviewed by fellow director Paul Thomas Anderson some years ago: "They are the only thing that stands between you and a good film") and justify his directorial methods by their efficacy. "If you ask me, I think I’m quite good at it," he says, "and by this strange behavior I might also get more out of Nicole than other people."

In the second notable DogvilleConfessions episode, Kidman can be seen having a quiet word with Trier. She tells him, politely but firmly, "I’m not saying this as a criticism but...I’d be really careful with all this sex stuff, the thing is if you make too many jokes about it...It makes everybody self conscious..." When I mention this to Trier, he says, "But to me it always helps, making jokes. Yeah, I know it doesn’t to the world but to me it’s a kind of a relief." And the example he gives involves his latest movie, Melancholia, and its lead actress Kirsten Dunst.

3. Kirsten Dunst

There is a scene in Melancholia in which Trier’s lead actress is stretched out naked. "I remember with Kirsten Dunst I only mentioned it as ’the beaver shot.’ You know, where she was lying. And I always made jokes that there were other beavers in the river blah blah blah blah blah."

How did she react?

"She reacted OK. She thought that I was strange and European. But, to a certain point, I come in their direction and they come in my direction, I think."

Dunst somewhat confirms this. She says that before the shoot the only person she spoke to about Trier was Bryce Dallas Howard, who played the Nicole Kidman role in the Dogville sequel Manderlay. "Who really loved working with him, only had nice things to say," says Dunst. "I don’t know, I wasn’t nervous because I know better than to listen to what other people have to say about people."

Still, she concedes that working with him did require a certain adjustment: "Definitely his sense of humour takes a minute to get used to sometimes. You know, whether to be totally offended or, like, brush him off, but he definitely has an interesting sense of humour sometimes...you have to either roll with it or you don’t roll with it. You could be offended by Lars...at first I was like ’Oh, this is weird and inappropriate.’ One of our first dinners, which was me, Kiefer and Lars, I remember Kiefer getting pissed at Lars, because I’m the woman at the table, and I was like, ’Oh, should I be offended?’ So I kind of had the breaking of the ice of how he likes to talk. And then by the end it’s just like, it’s not even...it’s like, it’s like he’s saying hello. There’s nothing that like offends me. He’s hilarious. But when you first get to know him, yeah, it takes a second to get his sense of humour. I always knew he was joking but he’s so sincere too sometimes that he does walk a fine line. When he called it the ’beaver shot.’ I mean, to me it was like ’whatever.’ I thought it was just Lars being Lars at that point. So it wasn’t really offensive or weird, it was just like, ’Whatever, yeah, it’s the beaver shot.’ "

"There are other ways of directing," Trier says. "There’s a lot of directors that just stay behind the monitor and send an assistant out and say ’could you lift your head a little bit.’ There’s very many ways. I treasure honesty. There’s some honesty in that I make a joke about ’now you’re going to be naked and we are all looking forward to seeing what you can show us later this day....’ It takes tension out of the situation. That’s what I’m trying. And sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t."

Dunst, for one, emphasises that she would love to work with Trier again. "He also made me feel very, very comfortable and safe too," she points out.

4. John C. Reilly

As an extra insight into the way Lars von Trier interacts with actors of either gender, and of the chasms of miscommunication and conflict that can follow, let us finally consider the case of John C. Reilly. Keen watchers of Trier’s films, or indeed of Reilly’s, may be scratching their heads to remember where Reilly appears in his oeuvre, and they will scratch in vain. But Reilly did fly to Sweden to appear in Manderlay, in which he was to play a crooked tradesman who tricks the workers out of their money.

On the day Reilly landed, Trier was in high spirits. He was excited to have caught the biggest trout he had ever caught in his life, and that evening he threw a celebration, in honor of both the fish and Reilly’s arrival. Things started badly. Trier says that when Reilly saw the fish, Reilly told him that he didn’t agree that Trier caught his own fish, and that he didn’t want to tell his children where hamburgers came from until they were 18. (From the way Trier relates this, it seems doubtful that he received this opinion in silence, or too respectfully.) Following on from this, one of the other actors suggested to Reilly he was someone who cared more about animals than human beings, and that didn’t go down too well.

The donkey—which would be killed and then cut up for food by the workers in the movie—was in the script that Reilly had read, but he had assumed that they were going to create, and then destroy, a fake synthetic donkey for the purpose. "Which would cost half the budget of the film," says Trier dismissively. Instead Trier had arranged that they would kill a donkey that was going to be killed anyway. (Trier insists that they ensured for the donkey—albeit a donkey he gratuitously refers to me as "this poor old suicidal donkey"—a better veterinarian-supervised death then it would otherwise have had.)

Reilly was horrified. He refused to participate if the donkey, which was not to have been in any of his scenes, was not removed from the film. Trier refused to comply. He told Reilly it was on his own conscience, not Reilly’s—"that I should meet St. Peter." Reilly couldn’t accept this. "I agree with him that you should treat animals right," says Trier, "but from an artistic point I just couldn’t be blackmailed into changing my mind." And so that evening was the last time Trier saw John C. Reilly. (The role was swiftly recast.)

"He said something I found interesting," Trier remembers. "’You shouldn’t kill a donkey for entertainment.’ I said ’Ah, that proves that you know very little about my films. I don’t think anybody will find them entertaining...’"

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